The Case for...

Scholarly Reparations

If Aldon Morris in The Scholar Denied is
right, then everything I learned as a sociology PhD student at the
University of Chicago is wrong. Or at least everything that I learned
about the history of sociology. At Chicago, my cohort and I were
inculcated with the ideology and ideals of Chicago School. We were
taught that American sociology originated with the Chicago School. We
were taught that sociology as a scientific enterprise, rather than a
philosophical one, began with Albion Small and his successors; that The Polish Peasant by
W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki was the first great piece of American
sociological research; and that the systematic study of race relations
and urban sociology originated with Robert E. Park and his students. We
were taught that we should not only read the Chicago school but also
venerate it, model our work after it, and pass its wisdom on through the
generations.

Albion Small

But The Scholar Denied shows that the Chicago
school was not the founding school of sociology in the United States.
Neither Small, Park, Thomas and Znaniecki nor their students originated
scientific sociology. The real credit goes to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom
leading representatives of the Chicago School like Robert E. Park
marginalized – perhaps wittingly. Moreover, and perhaps more
contentiously, The Scholar Denied suggests that Park
plagiarized Du Bois, and that venerated sociologists like Max Weber were
perhaps more influenced by Du Bois rather than the other way around.

The
implications are far-reaching. If the Chicago school is not the
originator of sociology, then why spend so much time reading, thinking
about, or debating it? If Morris is right, graduate students should
instead focus upon the real innovators and founders: Du Bois and his
“Atlanta School” of sociology. It only struck me after reading this book
that Du Bois had barely if ever appeared on any my graduate school
syllabi. Yet, this is not a question of addingmore thinkers to
the sociology canon. If Morris is right, there is an argument to made
that Du Bois and the Atlanta School should replace the Chicago School, not just be added alongside it. For, with The Scholar Denied, Du
Bois can no longer be seen as the “first black sociologist”, the
originator of “African-American sociology,” or the one who pioneered the
study of African-American communities. He must instead be seen as the
first scientific sociologist who is the rightful progenitor of American
sociology itself.

And
it works the other way around. With Morris’ book, the Chicago school –
and indeed early mainstream American sociology in general – can be
exposed for what it was: a parochial if not provincial body of thought
that reflected little else than the worldview and groping aspirations of
a handful of middling white men whose interests were tethered to the
interests of the American empire: men who had to suppress those others
from whom insights they drew in order to be.

Admittedly,
this exaggerates the arguments made in Morris’ landmark book. It is
perhaps the most extreme conclusion one might draw. But what makes The Scholar Denied so important is that it renders this conclusion possible and plausible at all. Thankfully, The Scholar Denied helps those of us who are willing to go there, get there.

From the Margins

Let
us return to the first issue on the table: the Chicago School. There is
at least one good reason for why Chicago heralds itself as the founding
school of American sociology. It is not mere self-congratulation. Nor
is it the fact that Chicago founded TheAmerican Journal of Sociology.
The reason why Chicago heralds itself as the founding school is because
everyone else does too. “[T]he history of sociology in America,”
declared Lewis A. Coser in 1978, “can largely be written as the history
of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.”[1] It is “hard not to see Chicago,” declares Ken Plummer more recently, “as the fons et origio of modern sociology.[2] Sociology’s “first great institutional base was at the University of Chicago,” Calhoun announces.[3] And, presumably, it was the first great intellectual base:
the leading sociologists at Chicago transformed sociology into an
empirical science, finally turning “sociology from social philosophy
toward empirical research.”[4]

Early
mainstream American sociology can be exposed for what it was: a
parochial if not provincial body of thought that reflected little else
than the worldview and groping aspirations of a handful of middling
white men

Morris
is alive to the fact that this is the “hegemonic narrative” about the
origins of sociology, and his masterful book does not so much puncture
holes in it as overthrow it entirely. “There is an intriguing, well-kept
secret regarding the founding of scientific sociology in America,”
reads the opening paragraph of The Scholar Denied.

“The first
school of scientific sociology in the United States was founded by a
black professor located in a historically black university in the
South.”[5] The
origins of scientific sociology, in other words, do not lie in the
Chicago School but in W.E.B. Du Bois and his Atlanta School. In the
early twentieth century, “the black sociologist, scholar and activist
W.E.B. Du Bois developed the first scientific school of sociology at
Atlanta University. […] Du Bois was the first social scientist to
establish a sociological laboratory where systematic empirical research
was conducted.”[6]

Du
Bois and his school innovated on several fronts. The first has to do
with the “scientific” aspect of sociology or, rather, the empirical
aspect. According to the hegemonic narrative, it was the Chicago School
that innovated: the sociologists of Chicago were the first to go into
communities, observe, collect data, and then systematically analyze it.
“The city of Chicago served as a social laboratory where empirical
research conducted on the major social processes unfolding in one of the
world’s great modern cities.”[7] As
Andrew Abbott avers, one overarching characteristic of the Chicago
School was that “it always has a certain empirical, even observational
flavor, whether it is counting psychotics in neighborhoods, reading
immigrants’ letters to the old country, or watching the languid luxuries
of the taxi-dance hall.”

The culmination was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918). But Morris persuasively shows that The Philadelphia Negro by Du Bois, completed in 1897 and published in 1899 (nineteen years before the publication of The Polish Peasant), is the more deserving text. The Philadelphia Negrowas
motivated precisely by Du Bois’ interest in systematically studying
African Americans. Whereas previous work “on the Negro question” had
been “notoriously uncritical,” in Du Bois’ own words, and lacking
“discrimination in the selection and weighing of evidence,” Du Bois
insisted upon “scientific research” to study the issue, and The Philadelphia Negro was
his early testament. Focusing upon the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia.
Replete with historical and comparative analysis, the work resulted from
“extensive interviews, with all families in the ward…surveys, archival
data, and ethnographic data from participant observation.”[8]

After
moving to Atlanta University, Du Bois continued this innovative work.
Though his resources paled in comparison to those of the wealthy
Department of Sociology at Chicago, Du Bois put together a team of
researchers to study African Americans in their communities and held
conferences for researchers on black life in America. They carried out
the sort of empirically driven work he had pioneered in The Philadelphia Negro but
this time studying a variety of African-American communities, from
rural communities to modern cities in the south and north. His teams
included black scholars like Monroe Work, who had previously earned his
AB and MA from the University of Chicago but who then joined Du Bois’s
research team to conduct studies on race, politics, crime and the black
church.

His teams included graduate as well as undergraduate students,
alumni of black colleges, and community leaders. Morris shows how an
entire “hidden generation” of sociologists was connected with the
school. Besides Work, there was Richard R. Wright, Jr. and George Edmund
Haynes. These and others “who apprenticed with Du Bois constituted the
first generation of black sociologists” and went on to make significant
contributions to the field.[9]

WEB DuBois (right) at Atlanta University

The
conferences held at Atlanta University were a vital part of the school.
Held each spring, they brought together white, black, male and female
scholars and attracted wide interest. Already by 1902, the “Atlanta
Conference” was being heralded by some as an important graduate training
institution for the “study of the social problems in the South by the
most approved scientific methods” – as Frank Tolman wrote in his survey
of sociology courses and departments.[10] For
at least a decade, a period spanning the first years of the twentieth
century, the Atlanta School worked ceaselessly, producing published work
like The Negro Artisan (1902), among a variety of papers.

Morris declares “no comparable research programs existed that produced
empirical research on African Americans” in these years.[11] And
the Atlanta Conference saw the participation of people like Charles
William Eliot, the twenty-first president of Harvard University, as well
as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Walter Wilcox, and Franz Boas – the
famous anthropologist whose thinking on race purportedly helped upend
biological determinism in social science.

Du
Bois is often noted to be the first “black” sociologist, but Morris’
point here is that Du Bois more rightfully deserves to be among the
first empirical sociologists, period

Du
Bois is often noted to be the first “black” sociologist, but Morris’
point here is that Du Bois more rightfully deserves to be among the
first empirical sociologists, period. Given his work on Philadelphia and
his painstaking research at Atlanta, Du Bois stands as “the first
number-crunching, surveying, interviewing, participant-observing and
field-working sociologist in America,” even originating what we call
today “triangulation.” Notable (white) journalists like Ray Stannard
Baker declared Du Bois in 1908 to be “today one of the able sociologists
in this country”, who work from Atlanta was “work of sound scholarship”
that “furnish the student with the best single source of accurate
information regarding the Negro at present obtainable in the country.”[12] At
this point Robert E. Park had not even started his position at the
University of Chicago. And it would take another ten years before Thomas
and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant would hit the bookshops.

Still,
just at this point of possible historical recovery, even the most
sympathetic readers might raise questions. If everyone at the time, and
everyone still, turns to the Chicago School for influence, and heralds
the Chicago School as the real founding institution, does not that
itself prove that Chicago deserves the title of originator? How can
Morris claim that Du Bois is the rightful founder of scientific
sociology if he was not influential as such?

On this point, anonymous posts on the internet forum “Sociology Job Rumors” are
telling. The site is a repository for students to post information
about the sociology job market, but it has morphed into a site that
gives license to certain would-be sociologists with a little learning to
say a lot. Recently on the site, someone mentioned The Scholar Denied, and
many of the posted responses were incredulous. One declared that since
Du Bois was not cited and was instead marginalized, he cannot be
considered a founder: “a citation analysis would be necessary evidence
to make an argument for the ‘founder’ of any scientific advance.”
Another post added “I’m not sure how DuBois can be a founder while also
being so marginalized.” “I’d venture that of the early 20th century
black sociologists,” wrote another, “Cox, Frazier, and perhaps a few
others were at least as influential on the field as Dubois, if not more
so.”[14]

The remarkable thing about The Scholar Denied is that it shows us that, in fact, Du Bois was influential
at the time. Morris mobilizes an array of impressive information
revealing that Du Bois influenced a range of thinkers whose debt to Du
Bois has been covered up. Standard histories of sociology, for example,
overlook the black sociologists of the Atlanta School and instead point
to Oliver Cox, Charles S. Johnson or E. Franklin Frazier from the 1920s
and 1930s who were advised by Park at Chicago (the influence of these
histories upon present-day students is seen in the website discussions
noted above). But the impact of Du Bois upon these thinkers is clear.
Frazier’s most important book was The Negro Family in the United States,
and in 1939, just after its publication, Frazier wrote to Du Bois to
tell him that Du Bois’ “pioneer contributions to the study of the Negro
family” was influential upon him, and that much of Frazier’s own work –
and of his colleagues – is merely “building upon a tradition inaugurated
by you in the Atlanta studies.”[15]

The list of others influenced by Du Bois is long. It extends to Gunnar Myrdal, whose book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)
influenced Supreme Court decisions and became a social science classic.
Morris notes that Myrdal himself pointed to Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro as a model for the sort of work done in An American Dilemma. Even more significantly, Mydral’s influential work cites Du Bois eighty-three times, but Park only nine.

According to Morris, Du Bois’ influence even extended to Park himself. Park’s 1928 article on “marginal man” in TheAmerican Journal of Sociology is
the smoking gun. In that article, Park proposed that migration produces
a hybrid type of social being, someone trapped in the “traditions of
two distinct peoples.” Park credits Simmel’s concept of the stranger as
inspirational. But according to Morris, who ably marshals evidence
provided by Chad Goldberg and others, it was Du Bois’ concept of “double
consciousness” that was determinant. Park just did not bother to cite
it.[16]

Or,
take another example: Max Weber. While many histories of sociology
claim that Weber mentored Du Bois while Du Bois studied in Germany in
the 1890s, they are just plain wrong. While known in Germany, Weber was
not yet a famous sociologist in the US (and he would not be until after
the Second World War) and was only four years older than Du Bois. While
the two were in Germany, “they were both essentially graduate students.”[17] By the time Weber had travelled to the US in 1904, Du Bois had already published influential works (not only The Philadelphia Negro but also the widely popular The Souls of Black Folk),
and in this sense it was Du Bois who was the known sociologist in the
United States, not Weber. This probably explains why Weber wrote to Du
Bois on a number of other occasions, extolling the virtues of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk,
urging it be translated to German, and inviting Du Bois to come to
Germany. It is also probably why Weber asked Du Bois to write something
on caste relations for Weber’s journal, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft and Sozialpolitik. The
invitation resulted in the 1906 publication of “Die Negerfrage in den
Vereinigten Staaten” nestled between articles by Robert Michels and
Georg Simmel, and its theorization of race in the US as a caste system
shaped Weber’s own thinking on caste stratification.

In
short, the elevation of the Chicago School has served to marginalize Du
Bois, even as Du Bois was profoundly influential for his time.
Narrating this tension is one of the many virtues of Morris’ book, and
it marks the tragedy that The Scholar Denied writes for us –
that we have erased the history of Du Bois’ profound influence upon
sociology from our most influential histories of sociology. We assume
Weber taught Du Bois. We herald Frazier as the most influential black
sociologist. We herald Robert E. Park as the innovator. So how did this
marginalization and erasure happen?

Black Sociologists from the Chicago School

Oliver C Cox

Charles Johnson

Heterodoxies of Race

It
would be comforting to think that Du Bois was marginalized because of
the narrow racism of the white establishment – the result of white
racists who suppressed Du Bois out of their own deep prejudices against
African-Americans. It would be comforting not because the story would be
a happy one, but because the ending would be hopeful. Since we
sociologists are no longer racists, we can rest peacefully knowing that
we would not conduct such an injustice today. And we can excuse the
early racists as being men of their time. Who was not racist in early 20th century America?

There is no doubt that naked racism played a role in the marginalization of Du Bois. In The Scholar Denied,
Morris multiplies examples. How Gunnar Myrdal or Robert Park directly
prevented Du Bois from receiving the right resources, assignments, and
credit are riveting parts of the book. But the story Morris tells in The Scholar Denied is
also subtler. It does not boil down to acts of racial discrimination by
a few men. Morris instead reconstructs the field of sociology at the
time, and, drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, shows how Du
Bois suffered from his particular position within the field as a black
man operating in institutions without sufficient resources. It was a
matter of the unequal distribution of capitals in the field of sociology
at the time.[18]

Still,
there is another explanatory current amidst the flow. It is not only
that Du Bois was black and other sociologists were white, or that Du
Bois suffered from lack of capital, it is also that he had dangerous
ideas. To be sure, Du Bois innovated by his empirical orientation and
methodology. But Du Bois also innovated substantively, birthing a
sociology of race that aimed to wrestle discourse on race away from the
Darwinistic, biological and frankly racist sociological episteme of the
day.

Participants and promoters of that episteme included most all other
white sociologists, and Morris pulls no punches when pointing out how
the Chicago School was at the center of sociologically racist thought.
In riveting swaths of The Scholar Denied, we learn about Robert
Park’s racist sociology, for example, a sociology that “portrayed
African Americans” as “handicapped by a double heritage of biological
and cultural inferiority.”[19] These
views compelled Park to side with Booker T. Washington in suggesting
that the best route for African-Americans was to become manual laborers
rather than to try overcome their “savage” origins (in Park’s own
terminology). These views also compelled Park to conclude that blacks
should stay away from cities, for there they would “only succumb to the
vice, disease, crime, and other evils rampant in city life.”[20] And
Park’s own famous theory on the cycle of race relations was
underwritten by Darwinistic thought on the inferiority of non-whites.

Park’s thought was merely the “conceptual framework” that could explain
and hence legitimate why the whites of Europe and the US were dominating
the world through colonialism –and why race relations throughout the
globe were so tumultuous.[21]

Robert E. Park

Du
Bois would have none of this. For, unlike Park, Du Bois’ thinking on
race was rooted not only in his personal experience as an
African-American but also in actual empirical research. Indeed, as
Morris demonstrates, Park was the subjective, unscientific sociologist,
not Du Bois. Morris points out how Park’s study of the black church was
based upon “assertions and the testimony of questionable informants”,
unlike Du Bois’ truly scientific research.[22] And
Park’s other work, including his theory of the race relations cycle,
relied upon little else than deduction, along with his own “impressions,
opinions and beliefs.” Worse still, it was based upon “intuition,
impressions, opinions, and travelers’ tales told by individuals with
ideological axes to grind and power to protect.”[23]Du
Bois’ work, using systematically and painstakingly collected data on
communities about which Park had little inkling, instead showed the social production
of racial inferiority rather than its biological or even cultural
determination. In contrast to Park, therefore, Du Bois’ sociological
research led him to break completely from social Darwinism and claims
“that biology and cosmically driven forms of interaction determined race
dynamics and racially based social conditions.”[24]

It
is not only that Du Bois was black and other sociologists were white,
or that Du Bois suffered from lack of capital, it is also that he had
dangerous ideas

In
this sense, Du Bois prefigured or at least paralleled the thinking of
Franz Boas, showing that racial and as well as gender inequalities
“derived from exploitation, domination, and human agency exercised by
both oppressors and the oppressed.”[25] Boas
is typically taken to be the major thinker who moved social science
“beyond biological explanations of race to explanations highlighting
culture as the determinant of racial outcomes.”[26] But
along with Boas (with whom Du Bois corresponded for decades), Du Bois
also “advanced and supported with his scholarship the idea that races
were socially created categories and that, despite the scientific racism
of the day, blacks were not racially inferior.”[26]

Morris
thus raises the possibility that Du Bois should be credited with
shifting the paradigm of thinking on race in the US. In any case, Morris
is unequivocal on just how seminal and important Du Bois’ line of
thinking is, at least compared to Park:

While
Park clung to the heritage of nineteenth-century thinking who stressed
natural racial hierarchies, and biological determinism, Du Bois
foreshadowed the current social constructionist approach, which
emphasizes race as a social construct and highlights the role of power
in establishing and maintaining racial inequalities.[28]

The
astonishing thing is that Du Bois came to his thinking on race at least
a decade if not more before Robert E. Park was spouting his theory of
the race relations cycle. Park’s thought was retrograde, even as the
hegemonic narrative heralds Park’s thought on race as innovative.

We
can now begin to see that the reason for why Du Bois was marginalized,
and why his influence has been obscured, is not just his skin color. It
is also that he was intellectual insurrectionary – intellectually
heterodox – challenging the hegemony of scientific racism upon which
white sociology had been mounted at the time. Heterodoxies rarely win
over orthodoxy, but imagine how much more difficult it must have been
given that the heterodoxy came from a black man in early twentieth
century America? And how much more if the orthodoxy in question –
scientific racism – had institutions with money behind it, while the
heterodoxy had almost no resources? This is the story Morris tells: Du
Bois was marginalized partly because Du Bois and his colleagues were
right, and mainstream sociology was wrong, and yet mainstream sociology
had all the power to define right and wrong in the first place.

Throughout The Scholar Denied we
see more closely how this marginalization and erasure worked. Morris
shows, for example, how the anti-scientific racism of Boas and Du Bois
developed in tandem, and that they corresponded and held each other with
mutual respect and admiration, but that Boas’ views were later accepted
and Du Bois marginalized because Boas was better positioned as a white
male at Columbia University. We see how Du Bois laboriously built his
Atlanta School but how he faced countless difficulties stemming from
limited funding and institutional help. And we see how he was repeatedly
set aside due to claims that, as a black man, his sociology was taken
by the powers-that-be to be “biased” (while work by Myrdal, for example,
was presumed to not be biased despite the fact that Myrdal was white).

One
instance of this suppression of heterodoxy is especially worth noting.
When Du Bois argued that his findings proved that black people were not
inferior, the US Department of Labor refused to publish his work and
even destroyed the manuscript report on the grounds that it “touched on
political matters.”[29] All
the while, when Park at Chicago or Giddings at Columbia proclaimed the
inferiority of the “savage races”, their views were taken to be not political.
They were taken to be objective, while the views of Du Bois were not.
Institutional racism here took the form of claims to objectivity and
science – and both functioned to suppress heterodoxic social theory.

Sociology’s Parochiality

The
story told by Morris is tragic. But, on the other hand, it should not
be entirely surprising. After all, sociology, as it has come to us
through the Chicago School, Columbia University and other major white
institutions was founded as a project of and for power. It emerged in
the nineteenth century as an intellectual formation meant to manage
disorder from below: to stave off the threats to social order and
coherence posed by recalcitrant workers, immigrants, women, and natives.[30] Let
us not forget: the earliest use of the term “sociology” in the title of
a book in the United States came from George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes,
who used it as part of their intellectual effort to vindicate the slave
system in the American South.[31] And
later in the nineteenth century, as sociological ideas conjoined with
scientific racism, and as sociology began to be institutionalized at
Chicago or Columbia, sociology’s task become one of giving intellectual
coherence to the fact of ongoing imperial domination, offering a
putatively scientific justification for Anglo-Saxon rule over those whom
sociologist Franklin Giddings and others referred to as the “savage
hordes” and “inferior races” of the world.[32]

Orthodox
sociology as it first emerged was parochial to the core, in the sense
that it represented a very particular worldview and standpoint. It
embedded and embodied the mindset of white elites in the dominant
imperial metropoles that, in those tumultuous decades of the early
twentieth century, were extending their violent imperial hand around the
world in the name of civilization – and to the tragic detriment of Du
Bois’ distant African ancestors.[33]

All
social science is parochial. The difference is that some of these
standpoints get valorized as universal and others get marginalized as
particularistic

No doubt, all social
science is parochial. It comes from a place. It is shaped by the
interests behind, around, and subventing it. Each theoretical
construction embeds a specific standpoint. Did Du Bois and the Atlanta
School have a distinct standpoint? Of course. Theirs was a standpoint
that came not only from their personal experience but also through their
empirical research into black communities. Theirs was a standpoint that
summoned the question that Du Bois famously asked in The Souls of Black Folk: “how does it feel to be a problem?”[34] This
is the standpoint that emerged from the field research of Du Bois and
his teams. But white privileged departments of Sociology also had their
distinct standpoint. And theirs was the standpoint of imperial power.
Theirs was the standpoint that did not ask how it “felt” to be a problem
but that thought in terms of “social problems” that had to be managed.
And theirs was the standpoint that defined social problems as anything
that disturbed, upset, or challenged the social order of the metropole
and the global order of racial domination.

So
yes, all social science is parochial. The difference is that some of
these standpoints get valorized as universal and others get marginalized
as particularistic. Some become heralded as objective and true, others
get resisted as subjective or irrelevant. Orthodox sociology, such as
that which emerged at Chicago, is parochial yet it masquerades as
universal, and it has only been able to pull off this God trick because
of the money and resources behind it – money and resources which the
Atlanta School were not afforded.

Running through The Scholar Denied, however implicitly, is this very story of standpoints, power, and marginalization. And this is why the story of The Scholar Denied is
much bigger than a professional insider’s debate about founders; bigger
than something that only the History of Sociology Section of the ASA
should bother with. It is also bigger than questions about who to
include on our syllabi, or what stories we tell of the University of
Chicago. It is a wake up call about our own professional doxa. It is a
call to be just a little more skeptical about those sociological
standpoints that purport universality when are not – and can never be.
And it is a call to be just a little more open to those standpoints that
get occluded: standpoints which would otherwise lead us to real and
valuable insights into the social world, just as did the work of Du
Bois.

Amidst the discussion of The Scholar Denied on
the website “Sociology Job Rumors”, one respondent wrote that they will
not bother reading the book because “it’s not relevant to the
discipline today.” If this is representative of the minds of sociology
PhD students in the US today, we are in a sad state indeed. For what
this sort of presentist response misses is that the story of Du Bois,
his influence, and his occlusion is relevant to the discipline
today. It is crucial for the discipline today. For it speaks to a
general social process in the academy that reenacts today what had
happened to Du Bois back then (however in ways that we might not easily
see). The Scholar Denied is a powerful and persuasive plea to
pay attention to those voices that might still be unwittingly relegated
to the margins on the grounds of their ostensible particularism or
subjectivism. And it is a reminder that the cost of such marginalization
is not simply an ethical one, it is an epistemic one. And it is one
that sociology cannot afford.

Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and empire; with studies of their psychological, economic, and moral foundations (New
York: Macmillan & Co., 1900).. For more on racial thought and
empire in early sociology, see R.W. Connell, “Why is Classical Theory
Classical?,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (1997),
Julian Go, “Sociology’s Imperial Unconscious: the Emergence of American
Sociology in the Context of Empire,” in Sociology and Empire,
ed. George Steinmetz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), and Julian
Go, “Beyond Metrocentrism: From empire to globalism in early US
sociology,” Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 2 (2013). ↩

Connell, “Why is
Classical Theory Classical?.” On the racial origins of International
Relations, and the marginalization of the “Howard School” of
International relations that is not unlike the marginalization of the
sociological Atlanta school, see the illuminating excavation by Robert
Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). ↩

Julian Go is professor of sociology at Boston University. Previously, he
has been an Academy Scholar at the Academy for International and Area
Studies at Harvard University, a visiting scholar at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in
Barcelona, Lucerne University in Switzerland, and the Third World Studies
Center at the University of the Philippines. He received his Ph.D. in
sociology from the University of Chicago in 2000.

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

In the United States, there is no official accounting of the people
killed by police. To address that void in information, non-governmental
and news organizations have been collecting data on such incidents.

Data artist Josh Begley’s new project, “Officer Involved,” uses databases on police brutality compiled by the Guardian
to present the problem in a new way. Begley’s project (like several
others he has done) is an intervention that makes visible the violence
behind the way we live. “Officer Involved” reveals the lack of innocence
in the landscape, and, without sensationalism or sentimentality,
challenges us to think about a deep injustice that so many of us accept
as normal.

In row after row, we see photographs of corners, streets, suburbs,
towns, all in daylight, almost all free of human presence. All these
images—in spite of the mysterious lyric beauty of some of them—were
captured indiscriminately by the all-seeing eye of Google, either with a
bird’s eye view or at street level. They were then selected and set
into an array by Begley. In one sense, they are the same as any other
stills randomly pulled from Google Maps. But when we look at these
photographs in particular, we are also seeing the last thing that some
other human being saw. It is an immersion in the environment of
someone’s last moments.

If it is true, as our ancestors always suspected, that the dead
continue to exert some influence on the places where they lived and
died, then Begley’s photographic project makes that insight manifest.
How quiet these scenes are, how charged by a crisp light and
brilliant clarity. They look like insignificant places, but all of them
are full of significance for those whose loved ones died there. All are
sites of premature death, all are sites where someone was killed, and
most also index an unrestituted crime.

The American landscape is thickening with these incidents. If
extra-judicial killing was always facile, the reporting of it is
becoming so as well. This is the value of Begley’s project: to shift us
into a sober space, a space of contemplation. It is important to have
the numbers, but it is vital to have an affective intervention like this
one as well, which shows us how difficult the current dispensation is
to bear, and how it marks us, the streets on which we move, the places
in which we live.